ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 887 



your able, energetic, and eminently successful officer of health. 

 Dr. David Davies. I hope he may favour us with his views upon 

 this very interesting subject, and may, knowing, as he well does, 

 how much energy and knowledge is required for the reduction of 

 a rate of mortality, tell us how much wickedness, perversity, and 

 ignorance is necessary for increasing such a rate, whether in 

 Great or in Greater Britain. I think that he will tell us that what 

 is mysterious is not the power of the principles of action I have 

 just mentioned, but the toleration of them. Such, at least, are my 

 views ^. 



We have several philological papers promised us. Amongst them 

 will be one by the Eev. John Earle, who is known to you in this 

 neighbourhood as living near Bath, and who is known to people 

 not so pleasantly situated on the earth's surface as you are, as the 

 author of a Handbook of the English tongue. I shall, as he will 

 be present hereafter to speak on philology, spare myself and you 

 the trouble of any remarks on that truly natural science, observing 

 merely that Dr. Farrar^ and Professor Hackel^ are both agreed 

 upon one point, namely that the adoption of natural-history 

 methods by the students of languages has opened up for them 

 a fresh career of importance and interest and usefulness. 



Somersetshire is not without its historian ; and the possibility of 

 his coming renders it unadvi sable for me to say anything now as to 

 the relation of history to our subject upon the present occasion. 



* Since I wrote as above, we have received the news of the murder of Commodore 

 Goodenough at Santa Cruz. Commodore Goodenough was one of those persons to 

 have met whom makes a man feel himself distinctly the better for his interviews and 

 intercourse. He was not only a typical representative of what is calle.i 'Armed 

 Science,' he not only possessed the eye to watch and the arm to strike, happily so 

 common in our two services, but he added to all this a cultivation and refinement 

 duly set forth and typified by manners which were 



* not idle but the fruit 

 Of loyal nature and of noble mind.* 



It is indeed a ' puzzling world,' as it has been forcibly phrased, in which such a man 

 loses his life, and we lose his power for good, through the act of what Wordsworth 



calls . , 



• A savage, loathsome, vengeful, and impure. 



Still Corfe Castle is near enough to Bristol to prevent us from forgetting that we our- 

 selves were once as treacherous and murderous as the modern Papuans, and that less 

 than 900 years ago. If we have improved, there is hope for them. 



2 Farrar on the 'Growth of Language,' pp. 17, 18, 'Journal of Philology,' 1868. 



3 Hackel, 'Anthropogenie/ 1874, p. 361. 



